data recovery and RAM drives

[happyslinky]

I'm not entirely sure if this is possible (seems like it would be)....

I have heard that hard drives can be emulated using RAM, along the same lines would it be possible to load an OS from RAM? Maybe have an image of an install of the OS and load it into ram from another OS or special boot util? Would probably have to be a very light config of linux....

anyway assuming that it could be done and the OS loaded from ram, with all data also being stored to ram, once the system was powered down would there be any way to reconstruct the data?

[shadowmaker]

ms dos is loaded into ram when you boot from the boot disk for 98...so ram drives are used...and they are fast...however once the system is powered down there is no way to retrieve the data unless its stored on a floppy or drive. so you still have write time.

[binary0boy]

boot proms also have os contained in them along w/ nic info to connect to the network. Like shadow said as soon is the pwr is off its a no go.

[slarty]

Yes, you can load an OS on a ramdisc.

Simplistically, you can boot a DOS floppy which contains a BAT file which copies the system on to a ramdisk then uses that to load software.

With Linux this can also be effective, and many rescue/ forensic analysis distributions are based on this principle.

Also I use a firewall, Freesco which runs off floppy - it works by loading nearly everything into a ramdisk.

You can make a compressed image and uncompress it into memory and use that as a runtime disc. It's very effective and only limited by memory and boot device.

Certainly any machine with 64Meg + can load a lot of software into ram

Cheers
Mark

[SDK]

When you power up a machine, the Os is transfer to RAM because RAM can be read alot more fast that a disk. So you always boot from Ram but the ram have to get is data from a disk.

Like Shadow said, Ram Driver is the utilies that simulate a hard disk from Ram..
And Swap is the utilies that simulate Ram from hard disk..